


always broken without an ending

by strangesmallbard



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, Angst, F/F, Mention of Character Death, Pre-Curse Breaking, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-04
Updated: 2012-12-04
Packaged: 2017-11-20 06:06:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/582118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangesmallbard/pseuds/strangesmallbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The animosity vanishes like a person curled in a magician's cabinet - with the almost sure but not sure trepidation of returning." Three loosely related drabbles. Swan Queen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	always broken without an ending

**Author's Note:**

> Written last year.

They try for Henry. Try to pretend not to hate each other's existence in the world they cannot seem to coexist in.

It starts with not fighting. Or at least not fighting as much. Somewhere along the lines of coffee meetings it turns into _How do you do, Deputy Swan_ and _Not so bad, how are you Madame Mayor?_ The animosity vanishes like a person curled in a magician's cabinet - with the almost sure but not sure trepidation of returning.

The coffee meetings become a weekly thing, starting at a specific time and ending at another. There was mirth in their words, and they almost forgot to hate each other. Almost. It is Regina who remember's usually, and she follows into the paradigm once again - leaving with a hurried goodbye and wide eyes and a half-empty coffee cup on the table. It's Emma who throws it away.

Then suddenly like the breaking point between day and night, where the sky is light, but the ground and earth is suddenly covered in dark; like the rain drizzling on a sunny day; like the quick-upturned lips of Regina's first genuine smile ever in Emma's presence-

_they truly stop pretending._

 **

It was one of those better days.

"Really Deputy Swan, I doubt you threw him three feet." Regina took the moment to sip her coffee.

"I _did_ , ask anyone who was there."

"And how, pray tell, would I do that?" Regina rose a brow.

Emma rolled her eyes.

"You're the master manipulator, figure it out."

"How in the world would I _manipulate_ someone into telling me if you threw a ten year old boy three feet across a lawn because he stole your ice cream cone?"

Emma wiped her whip-cream covered top-lip with her tongue. Regina's eyes flickered down.

The door bell jingled, and Mary Margaret Blanchard strolled in for her morning coffee. Noticing Emma she smiled brightly and waved, and noticing Regina, she gave a much more wary, small wave.

"Y'know." Emma cocked her head. "Dr. Hopper told me other day that I reminded him a bit of Mary Margaret. What do you make of that?"

Regina froze for a moment. The world froze. Maybe it ended. Emma was looking at her now almost the same way as-

"I wouldn't be the one to ask."

Mary Margaret left, as quickly as she had arrived. The bells jingled behind her.

** 

"I'm scared."

A whisper in the night. Emma barely heard whilst in the middle of dreamland and reality. She wasn't even sure she had heard it, because it was not the voice she was used to hearing. It's vulnerability was abrupt. The whispers were cocooned in the blankets and safety of the dark. She tightened her arms around the body in her arms, feeling her trembling.

"Of what?" She murmured, pressing her face into Regina's hair.

"I've made so mistakes, hurt so many. _I don't even know why I did it anymore._ "

The trembling intensified, and Emma didn't know what to say to a person who's actions were seemingly inexcusable. Who was as broken as a china doll. Whom she was starting to fall in love with, _maybe_ , against all reasonable thought.

"Everyone has a reason."

There was silence. The crickets chirped, and Emma remembered the dreams she'd been having. Graham falling, dying. A red-rose bloom dying. A woman standing in the middle of a ballroom, the darkness dripping off her skin in tendrils. She had been sobbing, her sobs echoing off the sides of castle walls mixing in with the innocent day. A beating heart was blooming in her hands, not bleeding red, but a staining blue.

Her own sword implanted in the woman's milky-white chest.

Emma dropped her head in the crook of Regina's neck. The moon light from the open curtains made her look almost ethereal.

She heard one last whisper before she drifted off.

_"What if my reason wasn't good enough."_


End file.
